In Peru, some 50,000 children as young as six, work in small-scale gold mining, considered to be one of the worst forms of child labour. According to estimates of the ILO's International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), some 11,000 children who are now under six could be recruited in the near future.

But the inhabitants of the village of Santa Filomena, a remote mininig community situated in the Ayacucho region in the Peruvian sierra, have moved on. This past June, the Minister for Women and Social Development, Ana Maria Romero, declared the village "to be the first mining community free from child labour in Peru".

"The girls and boys of Santa Filomena will no longer be exposed to mercury and have to carry bags filled with mineral earth on their shoulders," said the Minister during the inauguration of a small-scale gold-processing plant that will replace the child workers.

The community was included in the ILO-IPEC programme on the elimination of child labour in mining in South America which covers Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru where some 400,000 people, directly or indirectly, depend on this activity, and an estimated 200,000 children are involved in it or entering it.

Peru is the largest gold producer in Latin America and number seven worldwide. Gold is the country's main export and 13 per cent, some 15 tons a year, comes from small-scale mining activities with an export value of US$120 million per year. The mineral provides a livelihood to some 30,000 families.

Small-scale mining is considered both an opportunity and a problem in Peru. On the one side, it is recognized for its job-creation potential and its contribution to local development and the fight against poverty and migration to the big cities. Furthermore, small-scale mining earns foreign currency and permits the exploitation of sites whose low returns, simple technology and labour intensity are uninteresting for industrial mining. On the other side, extracting gold is synonymous with environmental pollution, serious health and safety problems at work, precarious working conditions and, more and more frequently, the use of child labour on extremely dangerous sites.

At small-scale mines, it is common to see children working inside the mine shaft, inhaling a mix of dust and toxic gases, or outside at the gold-washing installations, in high temperatures and torrential rain, inhaling highly toxic gaseous mercury stemming from the mix which allows separation of the gold particles.

The mining community of Santa Filomena has organized itself as the Mineworkers' Association in order to obtain such advantages as a permit to use explosives and improved transport facilities for getting the gold to the retail centre - all essential elements in improving working conditions.

On the basis of this community organization, and together with the NGO CooperAccion and the Peruvian authorities, the ILO started its project to eradicate child labour in small-scale mining in Santa Filomena. The ILO model of preventing and eliminating child labour was based on the promotion of sustainable development and community participation.

Thanks to the ILO-IPEC programme on the promotion of sustainable development in mining communities in seven sites in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, 1,046 children have been withdrawn from small-scale mining and 6,265 have been prevented from taking up work in small-scale mining.

To know more about the ILO's IPEC, visit www.ilo.org/ipec.